Is there a preferred website to purchase hard drives from (Best packing/safety)? Unfortunately, the ONLY thing we have around here is a Best Buy, and they don't carry it. Also, is there anyway to run a torture test on the hard drive before I do anything, to make sure it's going to last?

Noted that you already have a drive on the way…but for others, most of the major online retailers are doing a fairly good job shipping drives now. Newegg used to be abysmal, sending drives in clamshells bouncing around in boxes with no packing, etc. I've purchased a number of drives from them…all but two worked, one being DOA and the other had the click of death…but both were Seagate 1.5TB drives and they were very problematic at the time anyway. More recent reports say that Newegg have finally gotten their act together though and are packing them much better. All the drives I've gotten from Amazon, Dell and Buy.com have been well packed and had no problems.

First off -- GREAT WORK!!! This has been missing in the Premiere world for a while now.

As for the DOS only tools, that makes sense. I think hdparm -M will set the AAM settings. If wdilde3 is only available for dos then another quick boot solution would fix that (I used Hiran's Boot CD via USB to run the wdidle3 /S:0 setting to disable the intellipark). Without a floppy drive now a days, boot disks are harder and harder to come by.

BTW - I have not yet used your tool (plan to shortly on a 2TB upgrade). Do you have HD/SD recording capacities for different drive sizes using this method (1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB etc..)? Is there a maximum drive size supported by the Premiere or this process?

Thank you for this upgrade path! My old Series 2 finally died in August and I had been waiting to get a Premiere until there was some way to upgrade it. I ended up getting an XL for the added space.

What is funny is that I *just* purchased a Samsung LED HD TV last Thursday and turned the HD menus on. The disk usage meter was already pegged out at 100%. I have my Tivo record every episode of Cops (and a wishlist for anything with taser in it )and don't delete them until it absolutely has to. lol

I will be ordering a 2TB drive tonight.

I do have two questions:

1. Can you still use the 1TB (or perhaps a larger one) expander? Reading the FAQ, on the older models, it says that "Plug and Play" expantion will not work.

2. (Anyone can answer) Does the Premiere only have room for 1 disk internally? I've been searching for internal pics and have come up empty handed.

Thanks for the welcome and reply! I have been a long time lurker. I figured it was time to register.

Thanks for the pic. I scoured Google for a good while looking for one. The physical box looks like it would be easy enough to have multi drives, but it sure doesn't have enough space inside.

Even if I cannot use the expander, I think 2TB will do for now. I have not set any of my Season Passes to record on the HD channels yet. I think I will just reserve that for shows that I really want to watch in HD. I have tons of movies recorded and set to not delete. I like having something to watch even when there is nothing on TV. I have a buddy that keeps his Tivo clean. I want something to fall back on.

This Samsung TV is leaps above my poor Sony tube. lol Even SD TV and SD movies have a new "feel" and realism to them. I'm waiting on my points for the TV purchase to post on my Best Buy Rewards and then I will go and get a Blu-Ray player. lol

I just remembered one other thing I was wondering. I have read on the board not to tuse the Green Western Digital hard disks, and have seen some people that are using the AV Green WD disks. Are these ok to use now, just the AV Green line, or stay away from them at all costs? I run the RE3 and RE4 models in my PCs at home and thought about using them. I don't mind the extra noise as my Tivo is behind glass and silent and the extra reliability would be nice. Although, the lower price of the Green disks is also attractive as well as any power savings.

I just remembered one other thing I was wondering. I have read on the board not to tuse the Green Western Digital hard disks, and have seen some people that are using the AV Green WD disks. Are these ok to use now, just the AV Green line, or stay away from them at all costs? I run the RE3 and RE4 models in my PCs at home and thought about using them. I don't mind the extra noise as my Tivo is behind glass and silent and the extra reliability would be nice. Although, the lower price of the Green disks is also attractive as well as any power savings.

Hey Kelly, glad to help. TiVo Premier's actually come stock with WD AV/GP "green" drives (the TiVo Premiere: WD320AVVS and the TiVo Premiere XL the WD10EVVS) so when it comes to TiVo there's no reason not to use one. TiVo can't take advantage of anything more than 5400RPM or 8MB of cache, so both the WD GP and AV/GP drive line work fine in TiVo. The WD AV/GP drives are quieter than the standard line (such as the WDxxEARS) however even those are very quiet out of the box. However the Auto Acoustic Management or "AAM" on the GP drives can easily be adjusted to match the AV/GP drive's seek setting (128) using a basic tool called hddscan while you have the drive attached to a computer. Using a higher performance drive is overkill and doesn't net any sort of performance enhancement.

BR DVD's look awesome on the Sammy too!

EDIT: I happened across the specs for WD's RE3 and RE4 hard drives and they list the seek acoustics at 34dBA . By comparison the WD GP's are 24dBA to 27dBA and the AV/GP drives are 23dBA to 25dBA, so unless your TiVo is encased in a sound proof room I'm guessing the noise for the RE drives would be far too loud to handle…and again offer no advantage when it comes to a TiVo application.

2. (Anyone can answer) Does the Premiere only have room for 1 disk internally? I've been searching for internal pics and have come up empty handed.

It would be extremely difficult to fit another HDD inside. Beside potential heat problems, there are no brackets of any kind that could be used to attach another HDD. The existing one is on the sleds that are mounted on stand-offs going through motherboard.

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It would be extremely difficult to fit another HDD inside. Beside potential heat problems, there are no brackets of any kind that could be used to attach another HDD. The existing one is on the sleds that are mounted on stand-offs going through motherboard.

Brackets? We don't need to stinking brackets! In the old (S1 and S2) days we used to strap a second drive to the first w/zip ties (or worse, duct tape). I still have a "dual drive" S1 in the garage…just can't part with it. (BTW, I used the more sophisticated zip tie method!) Some industrious folks added a second internal hard drive to their Series3's and TiVo HD's as well. However the Premiere boxes are considerably smaller so there's no way that I can see to do that any more. (At least until they start making 2TB 2.5" drives or SSD's. )

Brackets? We don't need to stinking brackets! ... However the Premiere boxes are considerably smaller so there's no way that I can see to do that any more. (At least until they start making 2TB 2.5" drives or SSD's. )

My point exactly The only space I see that would fit another drive is beside the existing one - and to mount there one would need some kind of support. Plus we forget one important point! There's only one SATA connector on MB anyway I suppose one can route a SATA-to-ESATA cable to the outside of the box and connect to ESATA port there though

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Just started my Tivo Premiere upgrade. I got a WD20EARS from Amazon that had a May 14th (I think), 2010 build date. Setting the seek acoustics to 128 was easy with the HDD-scan utility linked in the Series3 drive upgrade thread. I had a lot of trouble with the wdidle3. I read in the thread that many folks needed to change their BIOS settings from RAID to IDE in order to recognize their drives, so I went ahead and updated that from the get-go. After about an hour of tinkering, I determined that my computer will not boot off of CD when set to IDE??!! I went back into my BIOS and changed the setting back to RAID, just intending to boot back to Windows and try later. I had forgotten to pull the boot disk out and it booted to FreeDOS without issue. It had no issue recognizing the drive. wdidle3 /d just caused the system to hang and then come up with a Fail, Abort, Retry prompt after a couple of minute from which I couldn't exit so I had to reboot again. wdidle3 /s300 worked fine. Hope to make it back this evening to actually use comer's utility to copy my virgin Premiere drive to the 2TB.

I think it was 9.8, or maybe 9.6. It doesn't matter, since you need to add the WDIDLE program to the /Programs folder and then access it via command prompt. I only used it for the boot feature to get me to a non-Windows command prompt.

I think that I am ready to take a swing at this. I have a Tivo premiere which has been paired with a cable card from Fios. I have also received my new 2TB drive from new egg that was recommended here by rich.

One question..... do I have to adjust the jumpers on the SATA drives for this process? Is the original source drive that I am pulling out of the Premiere considerd the "master" drive and then the new 2TB the "slave"?

One question..... do I have to adjust the jumpers on the SATA drives for this process? Is the original source drive that I am pulling out of the Premiere considerd the "master" drive and then the new 2TB the "slave"?

SATA does not have a master/slave notion, so no jumper adjustment is necessary.
Good luck with your upgrade!

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BANANA is the most common driver for CD/DVD drives. It's possible that your CD/DVD drive is not compatible. Try changing directories to R: or S: (A:\ cd R: ). See if you can get to wdidle3.exe that way. If not you may need to get The Ultimate Boot CD to create a new bootable CD with wdidle3 (downloaded separately).

Or is it WD's Lifeguard you're trying to use…or something else? Forgive me…posts become a blur after a while so you may have to spell out exactly what it is you're trying to do to refresh our memories (at least mine anyway ).

That's my WAG, but I may be off base a bit since I haven't gone down that path in quite a while. Comer or others may have better advice.

I connected my original TIVO premier hard drive to my PC by using an adapter cable

I connected my new 2 TB blank hard drive(Western Digital model WD20EVDS) to my PC by using another adapter cable

I turned off my computer.

I loaded the bootable CD into my PC and turned the power on. As expected, it now boots up in a Linux environment. It seemed to be working fine at that point.

It asked me if I want to:
[C] copy
[E] expand
[X] exit
[s] shutdown

I picked "copy."

Then it tells me it only recognizes one Tivo drive connected to my system. It asks me if I would like to use it as a source for copy

I click "yes"

THEN I HIT MY PROBLEM........

It tells me that it only detects the Tivo original drive and one other drive on my system----the hard drive on my PC. It asks me if I want to use it as a target for copy.

At this point I am stuck. I do not know what to do. I was hoping to copy the image from my original Tivo hard drive onto the new blank 2TB drive. But since this application does not even recognize that the 2TB is there, it will not let me write to it.

I connected my original TIVO premier hard drive to my PC by using an adapter cable

I connected my new 2 TB blank hard drive(Western Digital model WD20EVDS) to my PC by using another adapter cable

I turned off my computer.

I loaded the bootable CD into my PC and turned the power on. As expected, it now boots up in a Linux environment. It seemed to be working fine at that point.

It asked me if I want to:
[C] copy
[E] expand
[X] exit
[s] shutdown

I picked "copy."

Then it tells me it only recognizes one Tivo drive connected to my system. It asks me if I would like to use it as a source for copy

I click "yes"

THEN I HIT MY PROBLEM........

It tells me that it only detects the Tivo original drive and one other drive on my system----the hard drive on my PC. It asks me if I want to use it as a target for copy.

At this point I am stuck. I do not know what to do. I was hoping to copy the image from my original Tivo hard drive onto the new blank 2TB drive. But since this application does not even recognize that the 2TB is there, it will not let me write to it.

What do I do? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

TC

Could it be the adapter or usb port? Have you tried connecting the drive with the adapter under windows? That drive should be recognized fine as others have used it successfully. I just started the copy procedure on a WD20EARS tonight and it was recognized on an adapter.

Okay, I am trying to do this but I seem to have hit a roadblock.<snip>

It's probably a BIOS issue. I trust your PC's hard drive is SATA? If so try disconnecting your PC's hard drive SATA and power cable and connect the SATA and power cable to your new hard drive. Your OEM TiVo drive will be connected by the USB adapter which you know is recognized and you know also that your MB recognizes your PC's hard drive so the program should see both now. FWIW you don't need your PC's hard drive connected at all since you're booting up in a DOS program from your optical drive.